Empty Space

I was talking to a friend this morning and I asked, “What would you do if you didn’t have to work for money?” He replied almost immediately with, “Everything.” Everything is a lot like nothing. It sounds like something we’d love to do but where does one begin with everything? It leaves a lot of white space. I spend most of my time blogging about answers, findings, things that I’ve learned or things that I’ve noticed and it always ends up with loose ends tied, and packaged into something that has a beginning and some sense of finality or resolution. It’s clean, convenient, and easy to read. It’s also not very realistic. Recently, I’ve come to realize how many things I don’t know, how many things I don’t have answers to, and no idea what I’m supposed to do with all that empty space. I’m not saying this is something I am struggling with, or something that is unique to me, or negative in its existence, it just is. And this blog won’t end with an answer to that conundrum. It won’t attempt to glorify those gaps either or find the lesson – I’m sure that if that were my intent, I could probably do a decent job at exploring both. This is just the recognition of the space, the need as human beings we have to try to close those gaps, bring the “knowns” together over the vast trenches of the unknowns, and control the in between. I expend a great deal of energy seeking the calm and the control in the environments where I have no influence and the places that are unknown or the outcomes not yet determined. It’s exhausting. Ironically, the empty spaces aren’t actually empty… and they may be transient, but they’re certainly not going far. I’ll just have to get used to the (empty) view.